Changes VI (Months)

23:30 10 January 2009

I left for Bishkek today for the IST conference that will start tomorrow. I came a day early because I wanted to visit my old host family who live not far from Bishkek. It is really weird and neat to be back in my old room, the space that I called home for nearly three months. It’s significantly cooler than when I last was here but good heating and a relatively mild winter so far has made it very comfortable now. As I said, it is odd being in a home that was only a home for a short while but from which I have such strong feelings and memories. It was only three and a half months ago that I lived here, but I feel that the me that left this room left was a lot different than the me that returned today. The me that returned was noticeably different to my host family too- they worried over the fact that I have lost so much weight and were concerned that my new host family was not feeding me- something that is certainly not true. They were also pleasantly surprised with the progress of my Russian- that was really nice for me to hear since I didn’t think I had really improved that much since the end of PST, but I suppose constantly using it means that it improves even when I don’t realize it.

But the me that is different is different in a lot more ways than just mass and language ability. When I last left this room, I was still a trainee. I know that sounds kind of silly, and I don’t think as a trainee I was any less valuable than I am now, but there is a lot one learns and grows from experience. PST was a good time to get to acclimate to some aspects of culture, learn the language and the technical aspects of our service, but it’s not really PC Kyrgyzstan yet. PST is designed to be a stepping stone, like a glorified college orientation, that bridges the gap from the lives we knew to the lives we will live for two years, and it works very well in the capacity. But it is amazing how much I feel that I have grown as volunteer, a teacher, and perhaps more than anything, a person since I last left this village. These are differences which can only come from experiencing things first hand and throwing yourself into the middle of things wholeheartedly. These are differences that come from being nearly brought to tears in the middle of class because of frustration and getting so upset you yell at a child in a way at which you are later ashamed, differences that come from eating that mystery meat, doing so with your hands, finding out later it was sheep eyeball, cow intestine, or just horse, and doing it again next time you are offered, differences that come from seeing club members of yours moved to tears by service of their own in an orphanage, differences that come from being harassed every single day of your life because of where you are from, and differences that come from watching students that actually want to learn English, fail, and fail, and fail, and fail, until they finally succeed at understanding simple past tense or correct preposition usage. I think am a much different man than I was six or even three months ago, and it is something I didn’t even realize until I returned to something familiar, but oddly distant. A whole host of emotions, senses, and feelings rushed back to me when I returned here, but I realized for the first time that they are, in large, the experiences of a different person, or at least the experiences of a much different me.